Skimpy fragments add up

To Say The Least: Ruth Buchanan, Ash Kilmartin, Sarah Rose, D. M. Satele, Holly Willson
Newcall
15 October - 31 October 2009

This five artist show at Newcall has austere tendencies towards not so much minimalism, but rather, dematerialisation. Often this consists of traces that allude to earlier states that are fuller and denser with information, fields from which a selection has been made. Prying elements free of their original context.

Sarah Rose has two works that draw this out. One is a series of thirty A4 sheets with typed nouns pinned to the main wall. The words descend from left to right in the formation they would be positioned in within their original context: various Emily Dickinson poems.

Oddly Dickinson (1830 -1886) is a poet where there has always been a lot of conjecture about her original drafts - because of the many versions she left with variant wording, spelling, line length, punctuation and of course ultimately, meaning. The fact that Rose has worked with Dickinson’s ‘final’ texts is amusing because of their slippery nature - and variable interpretations that seem to change with each new anthology editor.

Brevity of fame is the content of Rose’s other work. On an outside window is a page with ‘as long as a rainbow lasts’ typed on it. Inside, on a timer so it plays only intermittently, is a nearby video clip of Nadia Comenici, fourteen year old Romanian gymnastic star of the 1976 Olympics, performing some of her perfect scores – memory flashes (for some) of thirty-three years ago.

Holly Willson’s two aural works are related to Rose’s visual contributions. One is a crashing piano chord that comes through the office door, and the other a selection of four fast snippets taken from a vinyl record. (Though it is highly unlikely, to me the samples sound like bits of Dylan’s ‘Blonde On Blonde’.)

Willson has a third work of a wide strip of muslin extending down from the ceiling, but twisted (flipped over) halfway down, and neatly folded on the floor. The stretched material seems to be a metaphor for time, and perhaps spatial context.

Related to both Willson and Rose’s projects is the display of residue from D. M. Satele’s opening night performance: two chairs; a video of some guy sitting on a bed in his underwear yakking on the phone; and two bound transcripts of six jokes from comedienne Wanda Syke’s ‘Tongued Untied’ TV series. More than props that remain from a past event, the joke transcripts seem a poignant trace of the television comedy - its shadow.

The works of Ruth Buchanan and Ash Kilmartin seem to have quite different sensibilities. Kilmartin has a small pile of paper pages on which he has written in pencil a text that diminishes in size as the pages get closer to the floor. It declares the work to be ‘self sustaining sheets’ and its logic seems to be that as the paper pile gets lower, the text is supported less by the paper and more by the floor. The accuracy of the text alters according to the position of each page in the pile.

Buchanan’s project is a fake lecture about problems of architectural relevance to local needs, that you listen to through headphones resting on a mirrored shelf. On part of it the speaker refers to buildings on the Chatham Islands that have specially designed flexible joinery. This lets them sway under pressure from the ferocious winds, thus providing a source of relaxation for the inhabitants.

Like Kilmartin’s sculpture where you have to look at several sheets to get its point, with Buchanan you need to listen to most of the recording to get its humorous drift. Looking at too few components won’t help you much.

This is a finely nuanced exhibition, probably Newcall’s best ever group show. The five contributors work beautifully together. Well worth a visit.

Repression or indulgence?

Clara Chon: Repression Revisited
A Centre For Art
16 July - 1 August 2009

Let’s start by having me set the scene, for this is one of those ‘conceptual’ projects where the imagination is the main material. Chon’s ‘work’ consists of ‘sketches’ for a One Act play called Photoshop Layaz: an ongoing and partly fictitious play in many episodes, written by Tim Coster and Ash Kilmartin.

In the ACFA exhibiting space the props are strictly minimal. Only three.

On one wall there is an unfolded sheet of blank brown paper. A grid of nine sections demarcated by creases. On the floor is a bare foam mattress on a beat up divan frame with castors. It is in a pink cover that matches the pink underpainting around the entrance to the ACFA studio/office. And on the opposite wall is a pinned up painted canvas depicting the back of a head of strawberry blonde hair. No face, neck or shoulders. Could be a wig. Could be a fetishist’s fantasy.

More important than any of these is a transcript of the play on the window ledge that you can help yourself to. It's jumbled. Scenes are printed in random order, Scene Four is split between the action and the description of the set, as is another with no number at all that has two alternative stage directions. And there is no dialogue - only laughter.

The dozen characters (some of which are intact families, romantic couples, and groups within the audience) act out a ‘plot’ which as the title implies, focuses on innuendo, aided by the presence of course of the mattress. Most of them are easily identifiable Auckland artists – visual and sound, or art writers – interacting in various Auckland clubs, bars and restaurants.

What of Chon’s psychoanalytic title? It tells us that these aren’t in fact sketches at all, but the remnants of a play once completed - but now with the embarrassing meaty bits pushed into hiding, leaving only the acceptable shuffled bones of a skeleton. The content pertaining to the handful of props in the ACFA space has been collectively censored. Those meagre props were once part of a larger, more lavish stage production.

Or ignoring that possibility, what if a work could be developed beyond these putative ‘sketches’ - by mentally correcting the sequencing and putting in dialogue? I can’t imagine it being particularly interesting as an ‘unrepressed’ project. Would it be less insular and giggly, less an inhouse clique of pals - all twenty-somethings - absorbed only with themselves?

Not that older generations of artists would be any different. It’s the nature of so much art practice right now to be preoccupied with its own social matrix. Celebrating its own perpetuation. Occasionally also critiquing it.

It is possible Coster, Kilmartin and Chon have a satirical intention - that they are lampooning a certain art coterie, or the idea of repression itself. Hard to say; they could also be boasting. Whatever the case the short transcript is a visually attractive little document, and fun to think about – up to a point. It’s probably not worth an arduous hike up to ACFA solely to retrieve a copy, but if you are going to the Civic or to SKYCITY for a Festival movie, and happen to be passing, you can always drop in.

Building a Future

Architecture for the Nation: New artists show 2008
Curated by Brian Butler and Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers
ARTSPACE
14 June – 19 July 2008

This show debunks the traditional notion of architecture to make it something principally collective like national identity. It posits the idea that “architecture has little to do with the construction of a shelter or dwelling. It is an arrangement of social thoughts.” An interesting concept to confuse its qualities with that of nationhood. Next time it is stormy, cold and wet, and you are caught in an icy downpour, just stand underneath ‘an arrangement of social thoughts’ and you will stop feeling miserable.

Despite the nuttiness of the wording of the introduction, the six artists are worth looking at.

Richard Frater’s has two sets of sculpture. One is a couple of twisted, wonky hoses forms that look like massively distorted hula hoops. They are lines suspended in space that are deliberately devoid of refinement. Their ugliness makes them funny – like say the works of Francis Upritchard – so that grotesque charm in fact reinvents beauty. Their lack of gracefulness is their point.

Out in the ARTSPACE office Frater has rearranged the ‘drop-in’ reading room to present a texturally rich carpet work with an ear motif. His way of commenting on contemporary art’s ‘arrangement of social thoughts.’ Strange looping tapeworm forms made of knitting wool are scattered over the floor, making the work beautifully rhythmic like a painting or piece of music but creating something that also suggests William Burroughs’ notion of language being a virus.

Rangituhia Hollis has a line-up of four DVD projections, butted together in a row to explore iwi identity. They represent his pepeha, a matrix of interlinking communal references such as relatives playing piggyback in the local swimming pool, his first student flat, animations of ancestral axes flying around a room and dancing in clusters, and virtual eels being jettisoned out of the window of the Waipiro Trading Company to cruise over the rooftops. Hollis has a flair for editing and image movement. There is a nice restless energy that underpins the excitement of his videos. He has an excellent text by Anna-Marie White accompanying his entry in the online catalogue.

Alexandra Savtchenko uses the neon signage on top of the Newcall building (on the Khyber pass Rd, Symonds St intersection) where the gallery she exhibits in is set up. She has removed the two ‘C’ letters from the top of the tower and transported them to ARTSPACE so you get ‘cc’ (‘carbon copy’ or ‘closed circuit’) there and ‘new all’ when you look at the building out of the ARTSPACE office window. A lovely poetic link to the social and utopian vision of the show.

Ash Kilmartin’s concise pencil drawings on long sheets of paper are single-point perspective, tilted orthogonal diagrams of walls with deep apertures - but with peculiar vertical parallel lines. You have to stand close to see them. They are like the anamorphic charcoal drawings of Mike Parr or the nineties paintings of James Ross in that they are deliberately optically unresolvable. They border on incoherence. This riveting, intelligently supersubtle work is based on two modernist buildings she has photographed, examined and documented. There is a superb mini-essay by Sam Rountree-Williams about it in the catalogue.

The two works by Simon Lawrence use seemingly disparate components with which the viewer needs to make connections. One is a map of the world, showing countries and dominant land formations, that is leaning against the wall. Nearby on the floor are some china animals (a squirrel and a kangaroo), a ‘Chinaman’ puppet head, and two photographs of a rabbit and elephant. The work seems an ironic dig at anti-Asian racism.

Lawrence’s main piece of sculpture is a variation of a work he showed last year in Christchurch Art Gallery in the Another Destination show. It has a flash-gun that fires regularly on a timer, and thin taped-together plastic tubes that extend up from a reversed vacuum cleaner to the ARTSPACE ceiling. They have paper streamers that move when the machine is turned on. There is also a video of a long spiralling shot from a moving helicopter, circling above a big city at night. The movement of the air near the ARTSPACE ceiling relates to the moving aerial camera pan on the video, and the flash to the twinkling city lights.

This work also has a social interpretation, the flash implicating the gallery visitor, the video the wider community, and the air in the tubes, breath from conversations bearing thoughts. It is cunningly ambiguous.

Tuafale Tanoa’i (Linda T)’s contribution is an ongoing programme of interviews made on the site in a back gallery that is used as a studio. She chats with various Māori and Pacific island artists and media personalities, such as Fiona Clark, Edith Amituanai and Paora Maxwell, and plays the conversations on a bank of monitors that have user-friendly headphones and accompanying armchairs. Tanoa’i is good at picking charismatic thoughtful individuals who hold the viewer’s attention, and who have a vision for this country’s future.

Architecture here (and so the gallery itself) is clearly a metaphor, a structure for the construction of a harmonious society, like a whare or church that shelters its communities from destructive elements, and this work is a key component in understanding the exhibition’s title. The exhibition overall is cohesive but with stimulating variety. The six artists have provided a particularly interesting group of works to spend time with. Don't miss it.